Next location prediction is of great importance for many location-based applications and provides essential intelligence to various businesses. In previous studies, a common approach to next location prediction is to learn the sequential transitions with massive historical trajectories based on conditional probability. Nevertheless, due to the time and space complexity, these methods (e.g., Markov models) only utilize the just passed locations to predict next locations, neglecting earlier passed locations in the trajectory. In this work, we seek to enhance the prediction performance by incorporating the travel time from all the passed locations in the query trajectory to each candidate next location. To this end, we propose a novel prediction method, namely the Travel Time Difference Model, which exploits the difference between the shortest travel time and the actual travel time to predict next locations. Moreover, we integrate the Travel Time Difference Model with a Sequential and Temporal Predictor to yield a joint model. The joint prediction model integrates local sequential transitions, temporal regularity, and global travel time information in the trajectory for the next location prediction problem. We have conducted extensive experiments on two real-world datasets: the vehicle passage record data and the taxi trajectory data. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in prediction accuracy over baseline methods.
TTDM: A Travel Time Difference Model for Next Location Prediction
